Tell us a bit about your role! Is there a “typical” day?
My typical day begins with a trot around the neighbourhood with my dog, Daisy, which is ever the priority. Then, I like to make time for expansive reading when I’m not too pressed for time. For work-related reading, I am a regular reader of Harvard Business Review and Gartner.
When it comes to the workday, the first thing I do each day is look at the sales numbers and our marketing attribution to the team’s bottom line. It’s important to us that this presence is felt, but that it doesn’t become an all-consuming piece of our team’s focus. I prefer quiet mornings and busy afternoons.
Our marketing team is about 25, half in Europe and half in the U.S., so a busy afternoon means that we’re connecting and solving problems together. Everything in between is centred around our priorities from the day – pricing strategy, brand work, performance marketing, and communications – broken up by more dog walks, of course.
What was the biggest challenge in getting to your current position?
The elephant in every marketing department right now is the challenging economic environment. We are consistently being pressed further and further to demonstrate our impact on the bottom line and maximise ROI. What’s very easy to do in that circumstance is trade off short-term gains and goals at the expense of building the brand.
I think one of the biggest challenges facing CMOs right now is how we distinguish strong marketing results from strong sales performance, and not conflating the two. We’re seeing creative effectiveness on the decline as marketers are more focused on nailing attribution, often at the expense of experience.
Even during challenging economic circumstances, marketing and brand building is a long-term play. If you’re not building your brand, you’re not building your future.
What is your personal background and what role did it play in your career?
My background is rooted heavily in getting creatives to understand that data can be additive, rather than stifling to creativity. I started my career with an out-of-home advertising company, which really set the foundation for understanding the science of reaching people.
This learning phase brought me to Universal McCann (UM), where we used business analytics to help brands build integrated, impactful experiences and IPG Mediabrands where I led insights and effectiveness, and ultimately all marketing sciences in the UK and Ireland. My last agency role was Havas, where I went back to my roots as Chief Insight Officer, helping us to build a data-led model to better media buying.
After a few years of consulting, I moved to Zappi in January 2020, just months before the pandemic. I initially joined to lead go-to-market before becoming CMO in 2022. Here, we’re helping creatives use real consumer feedback to improve their creative work over time, so they can prioritise their best ideas and go-to-market with confidence.
What is your biggest career-related win? What is your biggest loss?
So I’ve won awards before, but those are bollocks in my opinion. In my current role, nothing brings me more joy than seeing the people we bring onto our team really grow into their own and feel empowered to do their best work. To me, this is what leadership is about. There’s nothing that brings me more satisfaction than watching really smart people work together and thrive where they embrace both their wins and failures.
I think my biggest losses have come when I didn’t trust my gut in the environment or situation I was joining. I think we can all relate to being sold the dream but it simply doesn’t live up to our expectations. For me, these experiences have shaped how we build our marketing team and how we empower people to do their best work.
Which individuals and/or agencies do you gain inspiration from? Do you have any heroes in the industry?
There are many that I look to for inspiration. From a startup and tech perspective, Dave Gerhardt is a great, energetic marketing leader, as well as Justin Rowe of Impactable. Les Binet from DDB has been at the forefront of effectiveness in advertising for years, and always brings a fresh perspective.
Emil Kristensen shares insightful tips on how to build effective marketing teams. I also like Scott Galloway, a former NYU professor who has seen it all and spoken to some of the most influential voices in the business world.
If you could go back to your teenage years, would you have done things differently? Do you have any regrets?
Like every other teenager, I don’t think I knew my arse from my elbow when I was younger. I don’t have regrets, because life is too long to harbour those. But I don’t think I paid enough attention to what I was good at when I was younger.
At those young ages, we’re so susceptible to other opinions and following the right path that we can lack our internal perspective. If I could go back, I’d use my earned experience to bring that perspective more into the fray.
If you weren’t in your current industry, what would you be doing?
I would have loved to be a brain surgeon. Now while I think I have the hands for the job, there is a special intellect reserved for neuroscientists and surgeons. I’ve long been fascinated by both the intricacies of the brain and the largely uncharted territory that exists within its depths.
From illnesses to injuries, there are unexplored mechanisms of our brains that would be fascinating to explore. It’s a field where breakthroughs are still happening and there’s endless potential to really improve lives.
What’s your one big dream for the future of the industry?
Time and time again, we see brands overestimate their perceived importance in people’s lives. It’s our job to create the heuristics of our brand, and it’s not their fault if they don’t get it.
I’d like to see our industry become more intentional and see marketers take the time to truly understand what drives their customers, both explicitly and implicitly, to build game-changing work.
What are your top tips for aspiring creative professionals?
For creative professionals, I’d refer to the classic “proper planning prevents piss poor performance”. We live in a world that moves fast, and our getting lost in the rat race and chasing trends can put you in hot water even faster than it changes the world.
There is no such thing anymore as the lone creative genius sitting in an ivory tower and creating innovative ads. Creativity is collaborative now, and built on having strong ideas, but rigorously vetting them to understand what will make the biggest impact. Remember to draw on your personal experience, but know when to dislodge your experience from that of the masses.
What are your top tips for other creative leaders?
For creative leaders, I would say that you can’t take a knife to a gunfight. So often we have mandates that are focused on reaching new people and using X language over Y, but we get so caught up in the process that we forget our mission.
At the end of the day we can target anybody we want – down very niche subsets of audiences based on interests and histories – but we lack the why behind these efforts. When in doubt, creating impactful work starts with having an unflappable goal in mind, then acknowledging that you have the time and resources to actually accomplish it.
When you think about your team, what is the thing that matters to you the most?
The thing that matters most to me is that everybody feels empowered to bring their best ideas to the table, and has the freedom to pursue them if they think they will move the metre.
We pride ourselves on an agile, startup culture and hope that we live up to those virtues daily. When we have smart people doing work they care about, that’s the basis for really impactful work.
Do you have any websites, books or resources you would recommend?
As marketers, we have to be masters of none that understand the universe. Reading is an irreplaceable part of building that knowledge base. I’m a voracious reader who spend most of my time with contemporary fiction – the confrontations of people and society are of particular interest as a marketer. My favourite novels of late are Trust by Hernan Diaz, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, and Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead.
